Archers thread #179: Beavers, livestock, ferrets, but nododo! Discuss The Archers here.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads.

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed, and of course we are always delighted to welcome back former or occasional listeners/posters. We don't all agree on all points, although we do mostly try to be civil about it. Most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you'd be happy sharing a hot tub with Mucky Mick, or other unusual views.

Spoilers: not on this thread, please! We don't wait for the omnibus to discuss the weeknight episodes, but we do try our best to avoid cross-contamination from https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/radio_addicts/4636789-the-archers-spoilers-thread-7-cant-wait-for-702pm-join-us-here, where spoilers are positively welcomed!

For newer listeners, lurkers or those who just have no idea what we're talking about, @DadDadDad has created this useful thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3557323-For-Archers-fans-a-guide-to-acronyms-on-the-long-running-discussion-threads-and-any-other-meta-thread-questions-you-may-have - BOOP point for him! (See thread for explanation.)

The title started life with @JanglyBeads, whose autocorrect turned 'Oh no, nor do I!' into 'Oh no, nododo I!' on the last thread. For reasons of cowardice/prudence/lack of inspiration and the character limit, I haven't included @BeaLola's even more mysterious autocorrect - her phone had her asking Abdul if he'd always wanted children instead of Neil. Perhaps one of the mooted beavers can be Abdul.

For the first time ever I've added a poll to the OP. Over to you!

But a group of eighteen houses on a small estate, all built at the same time and on one road, and with no more area available for expansion, really shouldn't need to be complicated or have odd on one side even on the other or whatever else. Why would anyone selling those houses do that? Because that’s the convention for house numbering in England. It”s the correct way to do it

Although if a cul-de-sac, going round in a circle is preferred.

but I was trying to explain why it was perfectly reasonable to have a house numbered 20 in a street of 18 houses.

any man under 53 DadDad, some men over it.

Be on the safe side, shun lovely apparently young women giving you the glad eye and inviting you to assignations,

All this discussion of door-numbering is very interesting (there are a few streets in Cambridge where the numbers go 1, 2, 3, ... up one side and then continue down the other side - I've even lived on one). But as has been mentioned, the obvious explanation is continuity error - I don't need to remind the knowledgeable crowd here that the SWs just don't seem to keep track of precise locational details like that.

Great Pulteney Street in Bath has a 10A and 10B, but no '13" (which might be useful for a pub quiz). Otherwise it's numbering goes up and then down the street.

My road numbering is mad as a box of frogs, but we all seem to work from home a fair bit, and know each other. We seem to keep the same couriers and posties for years because we happily take in parcels and sort it amongst ourselves (so far quicker to earn money for them).

There is something very odd about the Horvilles (and Mick), but not in a nice way.

any man under 53

I'm 54 so you're really spooking me now.

shun lovely apparently young women giving you the glad eye and inviting you to assignations

Yes, well, that bit shouldn't be too hard given I'm not rushed off my feet with such offers....

Our area does this big time, eg Lodge Road, Back Lodge Road, Lodge Terrace, Back Lodge Terrace. Then there are back-to-backs which are on different roads, back-to-backs which on the same road which curves round the whole block, and back-to-backs where the “back” isn’t on any road and is accessed through a tunnel between two of the “fronts”.

Rochelle is bipolar and just starting to go into an ‘up’ phase ?

I used to live in Number Streetname, Village, Town, and there was a Streetname, Town. I'd occasionally get take-aways mistakenly delivered.
Sat navs probably helped fix that, but I occasionally get delivery riders attempting to give me food, which is a bit strange as they are usually for a slightly different postcode.

Back to TA, the Roach-hell story will be a reverse of the Baby Bun one. Speaking of buns, Roach-hell is probably a bunny boiler.

I can't remember, are you in Ireland? I've always thought Eircodes are hilariously chaotic. My uncle and my cousin live approximately 100m apart in two houses on the same farmyard. Their Eircodes share the same first 3 characters, but the last four are entirely different. Same with the church and the priest's house right next door. There's just no way you could fudge it and have a stab at the address. It doesn't help when they don't have a road name and there's more than one family in the village with the same surname.

How old was Meg, George’s saviour? Any chance she could be a long lost blood relation of George’s grandad Neil?

Susan’s comments to Joy re:maternal
abandonment were clearly there for a reason. I wonder if Joy surrendered Rochelle at one point or if Rochelle did for Harper and Noah.

I couldn’t tell if Joy’s “here we go” at the end was resignation in anticipation of a pattern of Rochelle’s behaviour or for the downfall of Joy’s constructed persona/history amongst her ambridge friends. As if it’s happened before and she’s had to move.

Hard to say - but it does seem that Neil’s story is there to support another story. (He’s old(ish) after all; it’s highly unlikely that anyone he finds he’s related to would want to up sticks and somehow shock Ambridge to the core)

Odd that we had Adam apparently discovering his half sister a couple of years ago. That went nowhere.

They are mystifying to human intelligence, but the online database works. I'm just grateful for anything that was able to help medical assistance get to my door in the middle of the night.

Yes. They couldn't have made it more obvious without incidental music - der der DERRRRR!

In the UK, I had a cottage with a name and no number, which shared part of its name with a bunch of other houses in the area (e.g. X Cottage, X House, Mains of X, etc.), and there was no street name. For a while, I kept getting random pizza deliveries...

I thought Joy was just showing the sort of normal empathy any half decent person who wasn't Susan would do.

That's definitely middle-aged, @DadDadDad. I reckon you'll be safe.

(I too am in my 50s.)

Glad Neil is OK. Rochelle is very pushy and I expect she can pick out a soft touch straight away. Rex hasn't got much of a back bone and Kirsty is the same, they just say yes to everything,are they scared of hurting people's feelings. Like Samo from Grange Hill " just say no".
I don't mean to be rude but door numbers took up a lot of space and I just strolled on by, but there must be more exciting stuff to talk about.🤷‍♀️

Joy and Muck always seemed to me to be inauthentic. Rochelle ditto plus a hefty dose of creepiness and stalkery-ness about poor Rex. I wonder if Rochelle is actually Richard...

Rochelle is very pushy and I expect she can pick out a soft touch straight away. Rex hasn't got much of a back bone and Kirsty is the same, they just say yes to everything,are they scared of hurting people's feelings. Like Samo from Grange Hill " just say no".

The complcation is Rex doesn't really want to say no, and he hasn't really been given a clear reason why he should say no. It might have been easier to say no if he'd understood why.

Rochelle doesn't have a job she needs to get back for, it seems. Wonder what she does for income.

I have a feeling Neil's foundling SL is going to piss me off like no other.

Absolutely.

i really hope we don’t end up with some reunion with an old lady at the laurels and it turns out he has a massive extended family who will populate the archers for many years to come🙄

I’m only feeling slightly positive to the sw because they are shipping Harrison out. Everything else is a pile of shite

I've got a horrible feeling Neil is about to try to trace his real mother - despite the subject never having been raised before as long as I've been listening. Through the births of his own children, through Caroline and Oliver becoming foster parents, through Henry's conception (no father), to him being placed with Knob's family when Helen was in prison, to Knob's attempts to reclaim Myson and most recently through Alice's traumas and it's potential effect on Martha - nothing! Plenty of opportunities (and I'm sure there are posters on here who can think of others) to raise the subject, for his memory to have been jogged - even if it had just prompted a quiet aside to Susan. I actually find it insulting that I've bothered to get to know these characters for this to be chucked in as an afterthought and for Susan (who would at the very least have been confiding in Clarrie at any of the aforementioned opportunities) to be in on it - it's just too unbelievable. If they really must explore this subject then why not at least pick a less well-drawn character (Hannah, Stella?) and give it to them? They can do what they like with Rochelle, but I'm far less invested in her (or Joy for that matter) - whatever happens there will feel like a SW engineered plot twist. I actually rather like the idea of her turning out to be Richard - whatever it is will not live up to hype.

Given the popularity of “Long Lost Family” and “DNA Family secrets” and “The Gift” podcasts and availability of DNA test kits as gifts it is utterly inconceivable (pardon the pun) that Susan would not have been all over the idea of Neil tracing his birth family years ago! She’d have had to be physically restrained from contacting Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell! Long Lost Family even did a whole series of episodes entirely about foundlings.